Campaign history

SELHuG’s campaign is the latest chapter in a long-running effort to get humanists included on Thought for the Day:

2002

Barbara Smoker

SELHuG’s own founder, the philosopher Barbara Smoker, former President of the NationalSecular Society (1972–1996) now in her 95th year, tried to take the BBC to court for breaching her human rights. In the same year over a hundred people including Richard Dawkins, former Labour leader Michael Foot and playwright Harold Pinter, wrote to BBC governors asking for secular and atheist thinkers to be included.

2009

The BBC Trust launched an investigation into Radio 4’s religious Thought for the Day slot and the possibility of opening it up to secular and humanist points of view, but concluded that the programme did not breach impartiality guidelines.

2017

Last December the BBC published a ‘BBC Religion & Ethics Review’ which continued its commitment to treating religion as ‘distinctive’ and divorced, in our view, from the wider philosophical and ethical discourse to which it historically belongs.